GEO vs SEO: what changes for a small agency

If you sell SEO, your clients have started asking about ChatGPT. The honest answer to "is this a different job?" is: mostly no, with two exceptions that matter.

What carries over

Google is unusually direct about this. Its documentation on AI features says you can apply the same foundational SEO best practices as for Search overall, and that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary. It adds that you don't need new machine readable files, AI text files or markup.

The eligibility rule is the ordinary one. A page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. Crawlable, indexable, useful, and written for people. Google's own guidance on helpful content asks for content created primarily for people, and not to manipulate search engine rankings.

So the audit you already run still applies. A page blocked from crawling cannot be cited, and a thin page gives an engine nothing to lift. Keep doing that work.

What changes: measurement

A search result has a position. An AI answer is a paragraph, and a brand is either in it or not.

That breaks the usual report. "We moved from position 6 to position 4" has no equivalent. What you can report is a rate: across these 40 buyer questions, on these four engines, the brand was named in this share of answers and recommended in this share. And because the same question returns different answers on different days, one reading proves little. Why the score moves between runs is worth reading before you put a number in front of a client.

What changes: where the work happens

Ranking is a property of a page you control. Being cited is a property of a page an engine chose, and that page is often not yours.

Ahrefs looked at this in 2025 and found 76% of pages cited in AI Overviews ranked in the top 10. In a 2026 update covering 863,000 keywords and four million AI Overview URLs, the figure was 38%, with 31.2% of citations from pages ranking 11 to 100 and 31.0% from beyond position 100. The method changed between the two studies, so do not quote the drop as a precise number. The direction is the useful part: a top-10 ranking is a weaker signal of being cited than it was.

Take an example from our own runs. In a measured run on Nike (August 2026, ten buyer questions), the brand was named in nine of them, yet its own website was cited twice out of 341 sources the engines read, about 0.6%. The engines were talking about Nike using other people's pages. That is one brand on one day, a snapshot and not a category statistic, but it shows the shape: a strong brand with little ownership of the sources.

The pages that fill that gap are review sites, comparison lists, forums and video. Reading the sources behind an answer tells you which ones, and it is the step SEO reporting has no habit for.

What to sell

You do not need a new service line, and you should be wary of anyone selling one as a mystery. You need a new deliverable.

1. A baseline: the questions a client's buyers ask, run across the engines, with the brand's mention and recommendation rates beside two or three competitors.
2. The sources: which pages were cited, and how many belong to the client.
3. The work: pages to publish on the client's site, and the third-party pages worth pitching.
4. The re-run, to show what moved.

That is a monthly report with something in it. How to write a GEO report for clients sets out the structure, and How to choose an AI visibility tool for agencies covers what to look for if you would rather not collect the answers by hand.

A caution on the research

The best-known academic result here comes from the GEO paper, which found that adding cited sources, quotations and statistics raised a page's visibility in generated answers, and that keyword stuffing did not help. It was tested on a research benchmark, not on your client's category. Treat it as a reason to write plainly and cite properly, not as a guarantee.

If you are new to the term, what GeoShark and GEO are is the short version. For the measurement side start with how to track your brand in AI search answers.